City watch.

Video Peers Into Lives Of Arab-american Girls

March 26, 1997|By Jon Anderson, Tribune Staff Writer.

At school, classmates taunt them in the halls about their head scarves, worn as a symbol of modesty. Others, in the streets, shout epithets about sand and camels, particularly when news from the Middle East turns ugly.

At home, their parents, suspicious of American ways, often keep a tight rein, holding them back from after-school activities, hanging out with the girls and, particularly, anything that might lead to dating boys.

That's the down side of "Growing Up Arab & Female" on the Southwest Side, as a video with that subtitle explains. But as a dozen teenagers tell it on this tape they made for public viewing, there are considerable benefits to being "Benaat Chicago."

They are, as that main title translates, "Daughters of Chicago."

"I love our culture. It's beautiful, when you get to know about it," Sanaa Maali, 13, was telling a visitor the other day at the Arab-American Cultural Center, 3148 W. 63rd St., as she talked, with feisty zeal, of Arab history, holidays, feasts, fasts, clothing, dances and foods.

People "just don't know us," added Deena Kundor, 14, who talks on the tape about her difficulty in dissuading new friends from old stereotypes, that Arab women are passive, persecuted or seductive.

She now has friends, Kundor said, who "did change their minds about Arabians. They look at me and say, `Hey, she is cool. She does have fun. She does go out. She doesn't just stay home and cook and clean.' "

Such conversions of outsiders take time and effort--to describe a culture built around family closeness, respect for the elderly and a sense of community. To explain a dress code that warns against skin-tight clothes, low-cut blouses and sleeveless dresses. To offer some sense of Arab contributions to the fields of art, science, mathematics and literature.

That's one message of "Benaat Chicago," to be shown at 6 p.m. Thursday at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Circle Center, at 750 S. Halsted St., as a part of the university's Women's History Month.

"My culture is protective," says one teenager, summing up what others might call family strictness, "and that's what I like about it."

The genesis for "Benaat Chicago" came two years ago when girls at the Arab-American center watched a video called "Tales From Arab Detroit," a documentary about that city's Arab-American community. In the best Hollywood fashion, one watcher responded, saying, "Hey, we can tell our own story!"

With help from the American Friends Service Committee, which provided two producers, Jennifer Bing-Canaar and Mary Zerkel, they shot 40 hours of tape, while learning how to pan a camera and not to zoom too much.

"The kids are conflicted. They love their home life. But they also want to have a life outside the family," said Maha Jarad, director of the Arab-American center, which offers tutoring, soccer, basketball and a variety of other after-school activities in a huge room decorated with posters and a map showing the 21 Arab countries of the Middle East.

One first choice for the video-makers was to show scenes specific to Chicago's Arab-American culture, among them jewelry stores, sweet shops, restaurants, cooking at home and prayer at a mosque.

More difficult was a decision, made by the group, to talk of matters that, to some, might reflect the community in a less-than-positive light.

Some said that, "at home, you're told, `Your brother is better than you are.' " Others talked of situations where parents pulled daughters out of high school, ostensibly to protect them from "bad influences." But, as yet another noted, such pull-outs often were pushed into arranged marriages, rather than shifting them to one of Chicago's two private Muslim schools.

"I'm not like a toy at the Kmart," said one teen, angrily rejecting the notion of arranged marriages or, for that matter, arranged dates.

According to the center, about 150,000 Arab-Americans now live in the Chicago area, many of them refugees from Palestine who immigrated after the conflict of 1967. As the video notes, most of the fathers, making a living as small shopkeepers, are gone long hours, from dawn until midevening.

It is not an easy life, said Sanaa Maali, whose mother and father, born in Palestine, spent time as refugees in the Jalazone Camp near Ramallah. Nor is it easy for the community when any public outrage, such as the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City or the unexplained loss of TWA Flight 800, brings bomb threats to their social center.

All terrorists should be punished, the video-makers agreed, but the Arab-American community, as a whole, should not be a scapegoat for acts of individuals. Nor should Hollywood continue to make movies, such as "Executive Decision," that depict all Arab characters as terrorists.

On the other hand, Maali added, there is evidence that outsiders are becoming more attuned to the nuances of her culture.

During Ramadan, a sacred month when devout Muslims fast from dawn to sunset, teachers at one Chicago school used to make Muslim students sit in the cafeteria at lunch time, next to students who were eating their lunches.

Now, more aware, they let their fasting students spend lunch hours in the gym, studying.